


Lipstick and Vodka

by Orockthro



Series: Lipstick and Vodka (The Leona Universe) [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: Alt!Gender AU, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Always-A-Woman!NapoleonSolo, Gen, Non-Sexual relationships, Other, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 05:54:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2457275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Illya sits on the floor of his mostly-unfurnished living room. It’s dark out, somewhere in that time of night when most people are asleep or enjoying themselves immensely, and Illya finds himself doing neither. He holds the cardboard album cover in his hands, the lithographic trumpet staring up at him, and contemplates the unexpected direction of his life. He has records. He has magazines. He has five suits.</p><p>“Have you ever thought of sprucing this place up a little?”</p><p>He also has Leona. Unlike his smattering of possessions, she is non-returnable.</p><p>  <i>(Or: Napoleon Solo has always been a woman, just like Illya has always been a Soviet. No one forgets either fact easily.)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Lipstick and Vodka

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Open Channel D and Elmey for doing some pinch hitting art work! :)  
> Thank you to kleenexwoman, pendrecarc, and cortue for help in various problems along the way, but mostly just for putting up with me.

Illya bought his first jazz album eight weeks after coming to New York. He didn’t tell anyone, kept Jazz his secret, not because he was embarrassed about it, but because it was _his_. It was another two weeks before he had time to purchase a record player to listen to it on.

 After he buys his fourth album, a handful of missions and a sprained knee later, he sits down on the floor of his mostly-unfurnished living room. It’s dark out, somewhere in that time of night when most people are asleep or enjoying themselves immensely, and Illya finds himself doing neither. He holds the cardboard album cover in his hands, the lithographic trumpet staring up at him, and contemplates the unexpected direction of his life. He has records. He has magazines. He has five suits.

 “Have you ever thought of sprucing this place up a little?”

 He also has Leona. Unlike his smattering of possessions, she is non-returnable. He sighs, only a little startled by the sound of her uninvited voice, and puts the album down. He’s bone achingly tired and wants simply to lay on the floor and listen to something, anything, and drink until he falls asleep again. That is looking like a non-option.

He’s been partnered to Leona for nearly a year and a half, which marks two years since he’s been in New York; three since he started working for UNCLE in the London office. This apartment is the most permanent place he’s lived. It’s secured not only with typical UNCLE measures, but a few of his own as well. Leona knows her way around all of them. After he pushes himself wearily off the floor, he finds her sitting at his kitchen table with the lights off, dimly lit by the streetlamp outside, and running a red-painted fingernail around the rim of an empty tumbler. He owns just two, the other laying dirty in the sink. She raises an eyebrow at him as he drags himself to the sink to begin rinsing out the glass. At least there will be drinking.

 “Have you come only to mock me, or is there a purpose to your visit?”

“Can’t a girl crave company?”

“Ah. Your date fell through.” It’s past midnight. Perhaps the whole date wasn’t a failure. Possibly it was Janice from the motor pool, or Helen from accounting. Illya thinks longingly of his abandoned Jazz record, his own version of a now-interrupted date.  He pours himself out a strong measure of vodka and places the bottle of bourbon he keeps on hand for Leona in the center of the table before joining her.

She pours herself a glass without her usual flair. “A bit prickly tonight, aren’t we,” she says. Her smile seems to falter, or maybe that’s only the yellow streetlight, morose and addling his thoughts. “Do you know why I picked you as a partner?” 

He takes a drink as she does, trying to follow the conversational left turn. They often start these evenings of theirs trying to match one another, though Leona usually gives the game up after two or three drinks, citing her privilege as senior agent.

“You didn’t pick me,” he says as the vodka burns down, comforting and familiar, like the woman at his table. “We were assigned to one another. As I remember, you were none too happy about it, either.” Neither was he, he’s embarrassed to recall now. She waltzed into Waverly’s office that day, wearing high heels that clicked the entire length of the hall (hardly clandestine) and smirked as she shook his hand. Illya couldn’t imagine working with such a conceited woman; the epitome of capitalism and the west, and everything he wasn’t.

She smiles again now, a ghost of that first smile, and leaves a waxy red crescent on the glass. “I picked you because we’re alike. That’s why we work so well together.”

“Of course, how could I forget. I so often wear lipstick.”

 Leona waves a hand, and Illya looks at her closely. She’s paler than usual, the bravado more forced. This melancholy is unlike her.

“You know what I mean,” she says, and Illya does. He’s brash, temperamental, and, according to several of his superiors over the years, harbors a rebellious streak as long as the iron curtain. Solo, on the other hand, is smooth and calculating, always with a card up her sleeve. On paper, they are exactly nothing alike. Here in his kitchen, in the low light and next to the white walls he’s never painted, they are more alike than he generally cares to think about.

“We’re strangers in a familiar land,” Leona says, drinking the bourbon dry in one throw rather than savoring it. 

He doesn’t ask, “What happened?” because that’s not what they do. He pours her a second glass.

It’s awhile before they speak again. Illya drinks, and Leona keeps pace.

“Do you know how many people in the world know me?”

 Illya raises his eyebrow at her. “Several thousand, I expect. Or were you speaking of men as well?”

She shakes her head and reaches for her glass. “Not just... people. People who _know_ me.”

“I’m afraid whatever American linguistic twist you are attempting to convey is beyond me at the moment.”

Linguistic twists are beyond both of them. The room is spinning around the dark-headed focal point that is his partner, the black hole center of his world. She licks her lips, patting down her lipstick. He used to think her vain when they first began working together, with her freshly ironed hair and her and her manicured nails, but it’s entirely more complicated than that. She always wears red lipstick for the same reason he always drinks vodka, never scotch. UNCLE would prefer the both of them to be something other than what they are, so they defy the only way they know how.

“My aunt died today. Amy.”

Illya nods solemnly and takes another drink. “I didn’t know.”

“My father’s sister. Do you have family? I never asked you that.”

He shrugs in a loose-limbed way that nearly sends him sprawling out of his chair. “None left that I’m close to. Were you close? To your aunt?”

She shakes her head, and her hair starts to slip from its arranged bob to fall in her face. “No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

She falls asleep in his bed that night for the first time. Her weight pulls the mattress down, and he falls against her, too drunk to care about American social norms as their skin touches. She’s the first woman he’s had between these sheets. He suspects it’s been just as long since she’s lain in a man’s bed. She falls asleep immediately, and he lays awake, struck with the vodka-induced epiphany of how desperately he’s missed falling asleep listening to another person’s breathing. It’s been years since he’s shared a bed for anything other than sex. Years since he and his cousins lay flank to flank, and before that, tucked in with his parents. After everything, it was school in close quarters, and military housing, where not a bare inch was wasted on privacy.

He relished the aloneness at first, a taste of a different forbidden fruit.  

He feels her skin, listens to her breathe, as steady and comforting as the double bass thrumming on the Jazz record he never got to listen to. The record is face down on his floor, and he doesn’t mind.

Her hand finds his at some point during the night, and Illya studies the red painted fingernails in the dark. They’re a neutral gray rather than crimson, camouflaged by his all-too human inability to process low levels of light. He knows the science of it, of course, knows how the eye works at a cellular level and how, when deprived, the brain reduces the world to black and white. He falls asleep drunkenly laughing (laughing is the wrong word, but Leona looks too comfortable to wake up and demand the proper verb from) until he tastes salt. They really are alike. A red laying next to red, each camouflaged in their own way.

 

***

***

 

Leona is tactile. Even in the first few months of their partnership, when she was a stranger in lipstick and he was a Soviet whom no one trusted, her hand would find his shoulder, or his knee, or a brief touch to his back would alert him that she'd managed to ghost into the room without his knowledge. 

He didn’t understand it at first, why she would waltz her way to his remote office with a bag lunch in hand, or why she’d invite him out back to her place for drinks. He assumed, in an astonishingly incorrect and oversimplified way, that she was trying to seduce him. 

“Why?” He asked her, ten months in, when the mind games were driving him mad, and he missed the smell of the tobacco from the Eastern Bloc almost enough to take up the habit with the American alternative. “Why me, in this farcical game of yours? Why don’t you chase Peters or Hellenbrand?”

“Why do you like jazz?” she asked instead of an answer. She followed him to a club the other night, and he’d let her do so, for a reason he himself wasn’t quite sure of.

He debated answering. If it were Peters or Hellenbrand he certainly wouldn’t. But this was Leona. Already she was different. “It breaks the rules,” he said slowly.

She quirked her head as if to say, _there’s your answer._ It wasn’t long after that she fell asleep next to him, smelling like bourbon and grief, and Illya began to lean into the touches, breaking the rules. Somehow, after that night, waking up next to her became a habit, frozen liminal moments where there were no confines of gender or nationality, no expectations.

Months became years, and the touches have become a constant reminder of skin on skin (on wool, on cotton, on the leather of his gun holster that feels as much a part of him as tendons) that he would normally have been deprived of in the West, where touching _means_ things.

Illya struggles to remember _what_ they mean. He struggles to remember anything. Time is blurring as he concentrates, melting from the beginning of their partnership to now, and he’s not sure when _now_ is, only that Leona must be in it. There was a mission, but its goals have blurred with his sense of time, and all he recalls is fire in his blood as a man holds him down with a syringe.

And now Leona is touching him again, just like in his memory, but her hand is hard, not soft, against his face. “Wake up. Wake up! Can you walk?” The man with the syringe is gone, and Illya feels light and free. Walking is easy. Running is easy. Climbing to his feet is a Herculean task that possibly is as destined to failure as his seasick venture with the Russian Navy. 

The brown muck that coats the floor and walls of the cell fades to gray, and his face feels numb as he tries to say, “You’re wasting time, they’re getting away,” but his lips have turned into rubber worms, and he’s not sure who ‘they’ is anymore. 

“Concentrate,” and she slaps him. He leans into her hand. He concentrates.

She braces under him, a practiced motion, and he puts one foot down and then the other, in a pinwheel merry-go-round of muscle memory and pins and needles. All the while Leona is hot and pressed against his side, and he leans against her, unconcerned with the burden of his weight. Walking takes effort, and his worm-lips peel apart to say, “What’s the hurry?”

Solo shoves her hip against his to urge him faster and says, “What do you think?”

He thinks that English is an ugly language. It has so few nuances, and his rubber lips form Russian shapes before he remembers to mold them back to soft consonants. “Bomb?”

“Big bomb.”

He loses himself in the touch of her side against his, her fingers pressing into his forearm where it’s looped across her neck, against his hip, hard enough to bruise.

Very little makes sense, so he lets her lead him through one door and out another, a maze, and them the two headed snake threading through it. He hopes they don't find their own tail.

Something long and gray is in front of them, and he flinches away. But what he thinks are scales turn out to be ladder rungs, and Leona is pressing the flat and sweaty palms of his hands to the metal and saying, "Go. Go!" He doesn't know up or down until she has her shoulder is flush with the back of his thighs. Up.

He climbs the snake. It's not their tail, at least. They haven't met their end.

Sunlight is unexpected, as is fresh air, and Illya finds himself face down in a patch of winter-killed clover, sweet smelling and soft only in the desperate clumps that are surviving into spring. He's keenly aware of Leona's hands on him again, brushing the back of his neck and groping for his shoulder and his elbow as she pulls him onto his back. He can still smell the clover. It's easy to imagine the plums of aroma as the darkening clouds above, shifting and swirling and pressing down into the atmosphere of his brain, cloying and clawing for his attention.

 "We still need to move, Illya. Come on," she says, and her hands are pulling at his shirt collar, urging him to rise of his own power, an impossible proposition, until he is doing it. Even once they're forty meters clear and have sunk back down to the ground, he can feel her hands on his arm, steadying him as he retches against a fir tree. Its bark is coarse, and sap sticks to his hands as he holds on to both his consciousness and his balance.

The explosion is a crack, more than a boom, and then a rumble that sounds like thunder as the earth shifts to accommodate the violent concussion. The soil roils, knocking them to the ground, and smoke rises from the hole they climbed out of, but there's no fire. And in a minute, once they've peeled themselves out of the pine needles, it's almost as if the THRUSH hideout never existed. It starts to rain. There's some effervescent, emphatic, existential thought rubbing at the back of his head, about how easily they are rendered into forgotten half-dead patches of clover, but it's too much to follow the logical thread.

Solo's hand is still hot on his skin. His head is clearing, partly from the rain and the fresh air. He blinks rain out of his eyelashes and takes a deep breath, only to cough until he retches again. He's metabolized whatever they gave him, but it feels cleansing anyhow.

"Better?" she asks, and her hand is once again at the nape of his neck. He turns away from the tree and towards her. She's muddy, her hands are scuffed superficially and plastered with pine sap and needles, and her blue dress is shredded and darkening in the rain as it soaks up water.

"Considerably." English words come easily now. "I don't suppose we got--" 

Solo smiles that slow smile of hers, the one she uses on women in dark, smoky bars that are so often raided. She reaches into her dress and pulls a vial from her brassiere. "Ye of little faith, Illya."

As they hitch against each other and make the long march back to the car parked four miles away, he turns that phrase over in his head. He has, in technical terms, no faith at all. He never gave faith any thought until he came to New York, to a land where faith is not a hurdle to be overcome, but a step 

He forces his feet forward, in step with Leona’s.

He has faith, of a certain sort.

 

***

 

The drugs wear off, the bruises heal, and they’re deployed again like spring wound toys. Leona is field ready before him, back in the fray only two days after they return. It’s a fast turnaround, even for her. There have been more and more closed-door meetings between her and Mr. Waverly lately, meetings that Illya is not invited to. The clandestine of the clandestine. He doubts he would have been invited even if he were entirely lucid within the required time frame. As it stands, he spends four days in Medical going through mind-numbing neurological tests that are more likely to condemn him to insanity than confirm his fitness. His feet grow itchier and his temperament more impatient the longer he stays.

 Leona is not present when he’s released from Medical in borrowed clothes and spare shoes. It’s hardly unusual for them to work independently of one another, and perhaps there are more lingering effects of the drug than he admitted to the vampiric medical staff, but it bothers him that she is in Peru (or Germany, or Alaska, or Massachusetts. Illya hasn’t a clue where she is, and perhaps that’s the crux of the matter) and not sitting beside him in the back of the UNCLE owned taxi. She would be flirting with the motor pool girl who's been enlisted as his driver, no doubt making dinner plans with her at this point.

But Illya must bear the silence of the back seat alone, and enter his apartment alone. He drinks alone, too, more than is recommended by the staff down in Medical. But the staff down in Medical have never had their minds played with, so he feels neither shame nor guilt in pouring out a glass.

He lights a few candles. They’re not special or religious; they hold none of the meaning he’s come to attribute to candles in the Western world, but he doesn’t want to turn on the harsh lights. He had enough of that while laying in a hospital bed.

Candles are the trick to making a home. His aunt taught him that when they first moved away from Kiev, and he was folded into his cousin’s family. Candles and bread, and anywhere was home. Feeling more nostalgic than usual, and still a little woozy, he pulls a loaf out of the freezer to defrost. Fresh bread is a luxury field agents can’t afford to keep around, but the idea is the same.

He only lived with his aunt for a few years, and even then he spent very little time with her. He was bundled up with the other children, and shuffled along to various adults while she worked.  Perhaps this is what Leona meant about her own aunt’s death, and the strange thing it is to feel a loss for someone who was both a stranger and not.

It shouldn’t surprise him, two hours later, when he wakes up to a dry mouth, a pounding headache, and Solo in his bed again. She has keys, although he’s not sure if she bothered to use them. He likes that they do this now, the casualness of her slipping into his bed, and how it feels a part of some normal routine, although there is seldom rhyme or reason. That it feels normal, as if other partners do this. He knows why he relishes it, but he doesn't quite yet know why she comes back.

It should, in theory, insult him that she only finds her way to him when she chooses, often when her conquests fall through. It should bother him, in theory, that he knows the perfume preferences of half the female staff working at UNCLE, just from laying next to Leona on these nights when a kiss at the door has her finding her way to him rather than to a larger, more energetic bed.

“Lima settled?”

She blinks at him slowly. “Peru?" 

“Anchorage? Berlin perhaps?” The ceiling is undulating. “Do you have an aspirin?”

“What on Earth are you talking about?”

 He feels the bed shift as she makes her way from it and to the bathroom, hears her rifling through his own medicine cabinet. “You should get a bigger bed,” she says as she comes back in the room holding three aspirin and a glass of water.

He glares at her. “I don’t recall asking you.” Glaring hurts, so he stops.

Leona is less than gentle as she shoves the aspirin into his mouth and pats his face like a cat, patronizing and grinning in the dark. Scowling hurts, too, but he does it anyhow.

“Waverly tells me you’ll be back up and running in another two days,” she says as she climbs back in with him. It is a small bed, compared to the behemoth Solo keeps in her home. Hers is a king, and it swallows her bedroom whole; dark wood and plush pillows dominating the space, allowing no confusion as to the purpose of the room. His is a twin, and together they take up every inch of the mattress. “And if you must know, it was New York. You know I’d have frozen to death in Alaska without you.” 

It’s probably not even dawn yet, but his body has given up the dream of sleep. “New York.”

“Mmhm,” she says, clearly growing sleepy as he himself wakes up. “New York. Waverly is making me CEA of Section II, didn’t I tell you?”

She falls asleep, thin puffs of her breath hitting the hollow under his neck, a staccato beat of a drum solo that won’t quit, and he lays there until morning.

 

***

 

They go out to celebrate. 

"Tradition," Leona says, but Illya's fairly confident there is not yet a tradition for women becoming commanding officers in the field, and if there is, that this is not it.

They go to a bar in the Village that Leona often frequents, with dusky lighting and voluptuous silhouettes, and a weekly payoff to the local police department that ensures raids only happen on pre-determined nights. 

That's how he finds himself pressed into the back of a booth with dim orange lighting, dizzily watching the shifting shadows as Leona flirts voraciously with a woman in a skin tight red dress that is probably illegal. The woman in red is pretty, in a classical sense, with striking blonde hair and blue eyes. She’s whispering things Illya has no care to eavesdrop on in low husky tones against Leona’s ear. He drinks and tries not to look bored.

There are a few men, but most are like him: merely companions to a greater end. One man, leaning casually with his back to the bar, catches his eye and smiles.

Illya's own eyes flit back to Leona, her arm already around the woman in red and shepherding her towards the dance floor. He could take the man up on the offer. He's perfectly attractive, with dark hair and eyes. Leona will hardly notice his absence should he decide to follow the man to a room, or even to an apartment a few blocks down. It isn't difficult to imagine how it would end. The two of them, with clothes discarded on the floor like snakeskins, rough hands stroking, perhaps kissing just as roughly. A give and take and tug and pull. Perhaps the man would tell Illya his name. Perhaps Illya would tell his in return. It would be quick and satisfying, and they would likely never see one another again.

He smiles back to him, but shakes his head. His desires are not so pressing as to send him into a stranger's bed. Tomorrow night, perhaps.

Tonight he waits in the shadows and watches Leona dance, and listens to the music.

 

***

 

Leona falls into her CEA roll with the same aplomb she falls into everything (and everyone). But her aplomb doesn’t keep them from being captured.

“Don’t pout,” she says, and he resist the urge to kick her.

“I’m not pouting.”

“You are, too, and I expected better of you. What do the boys in Research call you? Cold as the Russian Front?”

“I am certainly _not_ pouting. Children pout. Although, I am feeling about that chilled, so perhaps they were right.”

They’re locked in an industrial freezer. It's an inelegant sort of demise; clumsy, and typical of THRUSH. The back of Illya’s mind is doing thermal calculations based on cubic volume and their own rapidly diminishing body heat. The front of his mind is occupied with not paying attention to how quickly he's losing feeling in his fingers as he tries to pry open the hinges of the door.

"You're not upset because I'm CEA?"

The numbers his hindbrain are spitting out freeze at twenty eight minutes. Twenty eight minutes from now they will succumb to hypothermia completely, provided his estimation of the room's size is correct. They'll wish they were dead a lot sooner.

"Don't be daft. Waverly would have been a fool to appoint anyone else."

She snorts, but it is nearly impossible to see. She's shivering violently now. He is too. It's not the first time either of them has been exposed to extreme cold, but he manages to forget each time just how agonizing the process is. First, the tingling in the easily-forgotten layer of flesh at the fingertips, then the pain as they start to ache and pulse and burn. The burning is the worst, because of the terrible lie of it all. He would give anything to have fire near his skin right now. He’s lost feeling in his face and hands.

"How's the door coming along?" she asks from below him. Her voice is strained from carrying his weight, but not to the point of exhaustion just yet. He's perched on her shoulders, his legs dangling down over her breasts, and her icy hands are tucked under his pant legs and wrapped around his calves, sucking what little heat he has left out of him. She presses her face to his thigh to keep the cold at bay.

"Just dandy. Try and be quiet and not drop me." 

They have the bottom four hinges dismantled, but the top hinge, mounted above both their heads on the industrial-sized door, is proving to be the nail in their coffin. Perhaps literally. Her shivers are increasing, and coupled with his own quakes, it makes getting leverage on the pin difficult. He's using a stolen ice cream scoop to pry, his fingers frozen to the metal. It's two long minutes before he succeeds in getting the lip of the ice cream scoop under the head of the pin, and another minute of wheezing to get it pried out. For every frantic breath, moisture condenses on his hands and on the pin and freezes over them, until finally the thin steel pin falls to the concrete below with a hollow ping.

Leona drops him. He lays on the frozen concrete slab, stunned and still gripping the ice cream scoop because he can't move his fingers to let go, as she heaves the door open by the uncapped hinges. It swings wide, pivoting on the still-locked bolt, and a rush of hot air slams him across the face. He can't breathe.

Solo rushes out, stops, and then comes back for him.

"Did you break something?"

He shakes his head. "I'm fine," he wheezes, breaths coming in steadier as his lungs start to thaw. But he still hasn't let go of the metal in his hands. He can’t feel anything past his elbows.  

Leona clears the hallway and then leads him to lean against a large sink in the connected kitchen that matches the over sized stature of the freezer. She takes his hands and runs them under lukewarm water until the ice cream scoop drops into the basin, and Illya thinks he will either scream or faint. 

He does neither, but the world grays and narrows until there is nothing but the feeling of Leona's fingers massaging life back into his own, and the sound of her voice in his ear, sweet and melodic.

"Crazy Russian," she says. They're both still shivering. He's not sure where his shivers start and hers end, only that somewhere between the quakes of their bodies, the two of them exist. She says other things too, mindless words that are for her benefit as much as his. Things like, "I know you like to play it close to the edge, but you ought to have told me you were turning into a popsicle up there," and, "If you freeze to death, Waverly will send me out with some rookey as punishment,” and, “I thought you were supposed to be immune to frost, what with your Siberian heritage.”

He wants to say, “I’m Ukrainian, not Russian,” but his teeth are chattering too hard, and in the end, it doesn’t matter. He’s a Soviet.

 

***

 

“We’ve simply got to stop meeting like this, darling,” Leona’s voice says from inside the elaborately decorated plaster and stone tower. He can see her, but not clearly, as he cranes his neck to get a better view. He doesn’t have to pretend to wipe sweat from his brow. 

The Spanish sun is hot; Illya can feel the back of his neck and the tips of his ears starting to redden with sunburn. Leona should count herself lucky that she’s outfitted in that ridiculous sun hat. Unlike him, she gets to play a (well watered, well fed) baroness in their current affair. He, in turn, has to play the part of a groundsman, all the better to watch her back and keep an eye on the petunias. Considerably less well fed and less watered and much more grumpy. Her cover is a privilege probably due to her sly looks and willingness to flirt, not of her new position as CEA, but Illya is happy to blame it on that if it means she slips him another croissant as guilt payment.  

He can’t see whom she’s speaking to; both she and her companion are shielded by the delicate lattice of stone that is the northern Mirhab tower in the Alhambra.

“First in Switzerland, then in Paris. It’s becoming a bit of a pattern with us.” Leona sounds genuinely pleased.  

Which means it can only be Angelique.

Angelique, who left cyanide in the farewell cake in Solo's hotel room in Switzerland. Angelique who is loyal to THRUSH (so much as she is loyal to anyone) and will happily sign their death warrants and probably kiss them goodbye. Well, Leona anyhow. She would probably do more than kiss. Will do more than kiss, because Leona and the vixen that is atop the building with her are inevitable in ways he has long since given up trying to control. 

He buries the trowel next to the roses and slinks closer, avoiding the view of several THRUSH footmen along the way.

"Don't tell me you mind," Angelique says.

"I mind that THRUSH is here. You, my dear, never."

Leona sees him, because she turns her back to block him from Angelique's view. The movement also serves to thrust her into Angelique’s arms. 

The THRUSH agent purs something too soft for Illya to hear, and then says, far less quietly, “but I’m afraid, darling, you are a bit too much like a shoe: even a designer one like yourself comes with a pair.” 

Illya bites his lip. He can’t see a weapon on her, but that means nothing. She is certainly armed. Perhaps the flower pinned to her chest is laced with poison, or the gaudy stamp of gold and diamonds on her finger is a dart.

“Consider this a down payment on future investment,” Angelique says, still pressed to Leona’s side and still blocked from a clean shot. “What you’re looking for is in the Alcazaba.”

In the end they get lucky and leave with their limbs attached and the information they need firmly secured in a locked briefcase guarded by an UNCLE security detail. Their informant is less lucky, dead and removed before the Spanish police get wind of the firefight.

Illya sits awake in the hotel room, alone at two in the morning. Their flight takes off out of Grenada in eight hours, and while Illya chose to spend the time out of the sun and napping, Leona chose a more recreational use of her time. He closes his eyes and pretends to sleep. When the door opens he knows it’s her because of the way the key slips into the lock, and the way the light clicks on once, to clear the room of potential threats, and then off again, to keep from waking him. He doesn’t open his eyes until she’s crawled into bed with him and he smells Angelique’s perfume, heady and unique, lingering on her skin. 

She rolls onto her back, pulling away from him. “For a spy, you don’t fake sleep well.”

He snorts, too comfortable to prop his head up and look at her. “Perhaps I’m not really trying.”

He waits until her breath evens and she’s nearly asleep. “Why must you. With Angelique? You know it cannot end well, Leona.”

“Maybe because it can’t end well.” Her voice is light in that way it often gets just before she drifts off.

“I don’t understand.”

They lay side by side in an unfamiliar bed, with sheets wadded and pushed aside to fight the humidity.

“I think you do." 

Crickets sound outside their window, repetitive and soothing, like soft scratches on a record, until he realizes he’s drifting into sleep too. “Not with you,” he says, words not quite coming out in helpful ways. He thinks in English now, has for years. Although he is expertly fluent, he will never be a native speaker. He will never entirely cross that bridge. 

But Leona somehow understands. “I know.” And she rolls towards him, curling an arm around his neck, until they’re fit together like misshapen puzzle pieces.

 

***

 

Illya learns the intricacies Leona’s body, of how she secrets explosives in her bra, an extra gun clip in her garter belt, a stiletto in her stiletto. He learns these not when she undresses for him, but when he undresses her. She's shaking with fever, and he nearly pierces his own palm slipping her shoes off.

“You’ll be alright.” He says it like a prayer, strong words said in a strong voice, hiding his fear. They’re cut off from UNCLE resources, trapped in a draughty cabin, and the wood they have to burn for fire is mostly rotted pine. They’re lucky if it’s anywhere near 50 degrees in here. There is no one else he’d rather pray to than Leona.

“You just want to get in bed with me,” Leona shivers out.

"I’m already in bed with you.”

She opens her eyes, brown and red-rimmed. “Hm,” she snorts. “So you are.” 

Bed is a skinny cot, even smaller than his own, surrounded by musty blankets and the hides of long-dead animals. His palms find the flat skin of her sides and stomach under her breasts, and he tries to press his coolness into her. She’s so hot, and yet they run the risk of freezing to death. It’s a nearly laughable conundrum.

“Go to sleep,” he tells her. “Dancer and Slate will be here in a few hours.” He hopes at least, presuming their distress call went out.   

Her teeth chatter, and her skin burns him. “I can’t.”

“You must.”

“Tell me a story?”

The fire is just an ember in the wood stove; a compromise between what he needs to survive, and his reluctance to bring any more heat to Leona’s feverish body. It reeks of rot and desperation. 

He sighs and strokes her hair, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “I’m not a good story teller. I have very little... flair.”

She looks up at him with flat, feverish eyes. “Illya. Please.”

He lets his hands drift to stroke her face. “Alright.” He lays back into a pile of beaver pelts, Leona nestled between his legs and half draped against him. “There was once a man who lived in a small village in Russian, in a provence you’ve never heard of, where everyone wore hats.” He feels Leona chuckle, the movement sending a shake throughs his body, too. “Don’t laugh, this part is true. Everyone wore hats. One day this man’s family ran out of firewood, and he knew that unless he went out to get more, they would freeze and die. So he left them and went into the woods to cut down a tree.” 

“This is your idea of a story?” 

“Hush,” he says, and goes back to stroking her hair. “You wanted a story, and I told you I’m not good at them. I’m happy to stop.”

“No. Keep going,” she says, and thumps her head against his chest.

He takes a breath and watches the embers burn. “So the man goes into the woods. But as he’s going to chop down the tree, a blizzard hits, and he’s forced to take shelter in a shack for four days. Finally the snow stops enough that he can go home to his family and bring home the wood they need. Only as he’s walking into town, his neighbor stops him. ‘You are not wearing your hat,’ his neighbor tells him. And the man realizes that his hat is lost forever.”

He lays a hand on Leona’s head and tries to gauge if her fever is up or down, or if his hands are too cold to tell. She’s quite, and for a moment he thinks she’s finally fallen asleep. But then she says against his chest, “What. That’s the end?”

“Yes.”

“How can that be the end?”

“It just is. Now go to sleep.”

She shifts until she’s half kneeling, half still leaned against him, and her head is tipped back so she can see him. The embers shoot flickering red and orange light across her sweat covered breasts and arms, and she looks like something out of a story herself, dark and dangerous and surrounded by pine smoke. She stares at him, waiting.

He groans. “Your rigid American literalism is exhausting, even when you’re ill. The man left and came home different, something his friends and family didn’t recognise. Surely this is not difficult to comprehend.” 

She’s quiet. Her arms snake around him again, until they’re pressed skin to skin among the furs of strange creatures. “Mhmm,” she says, and it rattles in his chest.

She sleeps, and rescue comes, and four weeks later there’s a bright red cowboy hat sitting on his desk with a note pinned to it. ‘I found your hat,’ it reads in Leona’s handwriting.   

“This isn’t what I meant,” he says, and stares at it as if it had teeth. It’s tacky beyond reproach, and certainly nothing Leona herself would be caught dead in.

“I know,” she says with a cheeky grin.

“It’s hideous.” He keeps it half to spite her.

When she comes into his bed again, smelling like motor oil and Janice and wearing an unfamiliar nightgown, he smiles at every rule broken.

“What are you so happy about?” she says. “It was me who got lucky.” 

“Hmm,” he says, and scoots down among the blankets until the crown of his head is nestled under her arm, tucked tight and held close like a secret.

“Bed hog.” But she pats his head pulls him closer, and he falls to the sound of her breathing and the press of her skin against his own.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Napoleon as a woman has haunted me for ages. I hope I was able to do it a bit of justice. This fic went through some pretty serious revisions and re-writes along the way, and looks pretty damned different now from when I started (in Russia, in Leona's POV!). This is probably not the last of Leona... These two are very fun to write, and I'm a major sucker for queer platonic relationships. ;)  
> Thanks for reading!


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